Party Favoring Ties With Russia Builds Lead in Moldova Elections

Published: March 1, 1994

KIEV, Ukraine, Feb. 28—
The former Communist establishment took a huge lead over both nationalists and market reformers in war-torn Moldova's first parliamentary elections Sunday, preliminary results indicated today.

The Agrarian-Democratic Party had 45 percent of the vote and the pro-Russian Socialist bloc 25 percent with a third of the votes counted by late today. Vote counting is painfully slow in Moldova, an agricultural country of isolated villages and poor communications.

The vote signifies that Moldovans want to make peace with the Russian-occupied breakaway region of Trans-Dneister and have rejected the old nationalist aspiration to reunite with neighboring Romania. Next Sunday there will be a nationwide opinion poll on unification.

After an initial nationalist experiment, as in Georgia and other former Soviet republics, Moldova is slowly returning to the Russian sphere in the pragmatic realization that Moscow holds the keys to its territorial integrity and economic survival. 'We Want an Economic Union'

"I'm voting Agrarian because we want unity, we want to trade with other countries and we want an economic union," said Ivan P. Kolybash, a 53-year-old teacher in a farming village.

Mr. Kolybash was referring to the customs duty war that Moscow started last year when Moldova refused to join the Commonwealth of Independent States. Prime Minister Andrei Sangheli, who ran on the Agrarian ticket, led a successful effort to get Moldova to sign on and then persuaded Moscow to reduce the trade limitations.

The teacher was also concerned about the unresolved civil war, which took 500 lives in 1992. It erupted when the Slavic-dominated region of Trans-Dneister felt threatened by the pro-Romanian, nationalist Government, which came to power in the exhilaration of freedom from the Soviet yoke.

A fragile peace has been maintained since July 1992, largely through the presence of over 7,000 Russian troops. However, negotiations on a final political settlement to withdraw the Russian troops and grant the region a special autonomous status have stalled.

The self-declared independent republic of Trans-Dneister boycotted yesterday's elections. Inhabitants were allowed to cross over the Dneister River to vote in Moldova proper.

The ethnic tensions and Russian military presence drew a pack of international observers from 15 countries to Moldova, a remote corner of East Europe, to insure the elections were free and fair.